Who would have thought that they could do the opposite?
PAIN: 5 Reasons why taking pain killers is making it worse:
When you have been on pain medication for a long time we assume that the pain medication will either keep working as it did in the beginning, giving you the same relief as it did or that given time, the pain that you have will subside.
What many don’t realize is that taking pain medication for a long time, several months or years, especially taking opioid pain killers like codeine, they actually can make your pain worse.
It is why so my people you know say things like “I keep taking more and more pills, but my pain is getting worse.” OR “They keep putting me on stronger and stronger pain killers, but it has made no difference.”
These are the 5 Reasons why
1. Your body adapts
Whenever you take anything for a long time the body adapts to that medication. One of the ways it adapts to when you take pain killers for a long time is that it tries to remove the medication from the body faster.
The body does not like change. So, by adding something to the system for a long time, the body is always trying to go back to how it was before.One way to remove the pain killer faster from the body.
This ends up causing you to require a higher dose of pain killers when you have been on it for a long time to get the same duration of effect you had when you first took the pills.
2. Your body becomes tolerant to the pills
The second way the body adapts to the pain pills effects is by changing how much is needed to trigger the relief. The body changes how it responds to the effect of the pill.If the effect of the pill is to block a nerve from sending pain signals, what the body does is changes how much it takes to block the nerve from sending a signal.
If before it took 20 of the chemical receptors (places where the pain killers attach) that is needed to block the nerve from sending pain signals to your brain, now it takes 150 as an example. The body increases the number of receptors on these nerves so that it requires a lot more of the pain killer at higher doses to get the effect of blocking the nerve.
This happens over many months and years of using pills to manage pain.
That is why you always seem to need more. The more you take, the more the body adapts to reduce its effect, so the more you take to get the effect.
3. You become dependent
That is right. You may not even realize that you are completely dependent on pills.If you are saying things like “I cannot get through the day without taking something”. You have a problem.
if you need painkillers just to make it through the day. This is not normal or a good space to be.
What is worse you might even feel that you cannot live your life without them. That you will only stop taking them if your pain improves or get better.
You are in a catch 22. If your pain gets better, you will stop taking them but for your pain to get better you must stop them.
That means you are dependent. Yes, you are absolutely in pain. The pain is real.
But you could already be on a very slippery slope that leads to full-blown drug addiction. If you or anyone you know sounds anything like this. Now is the time to act.
The longer you wait, the harder it will be to stop and come off painkillers.
You can become emotionally dependent on them too.
If every time someone in pain gets stressed or something bad happens that affects them emotionally this often causes their pain to feel worse and more intense. They will obviously choose to take a pill to reduce their pain made worse by the emotionally distressing event instead of dealing with the emotionally stressing event that caused the pain to feel more intense.
if every time you are stressed and it makes the pain worse you take a pain killer first instead of dealing with your stress. You are managing your stress with pain killers.
Your loved one may only be physically dependent. Once they become emotionally dependent on the relief the pain pills provide, getting a person off and staying off is much harder.
Now you need pain pills to manage stress on top of already needing them to manage pain.
Take them to your local GP. If they will not go, visit them anyway and tell them your concerns about them. They will try and help you.
4. Opioid-induced hyperalgesia
That is a lot of Latin for Opioid (codeine/morphine type pain killers) Induced(caused) Hyperalgesia (abnormally sensitive to pain)
This is when a person, when using opioid-based pain killers like codeine, morphine and others containing similar substances, become abnormally sensitive to pain. It also causes an abnormal increase in the severity of the pain someone experiences without there be any reason for the increase.
Essentially, nothing happened that can explain why the pain is now worse.
So yes. Pain pills containing opioids when taken longer than a few weeks to manage new pain that comes with an injury or surgery will lead to you becoming abnormally sensitive to pain. Or just increase the intensity of the pain you already experience.
This is why they should only be used for a few weeks. Any longer and it just causes huge problems like this. Addiction and dependence go hand in hand with this.
5. Pain killers do not work to help what you have
I know. It is scary though. There are absolutely conditions where pain killers have little or no effect. You might have already experienced a time when you had pain come out of nowhere and no matter what you did nothing helped. Including taking painkillers. Or maybe they only worked because they put you to sleep. If it must put you to sleep to work…… Maybe it doesn’t work? You cannot sleep your life away because you have pain.
Maybe you should have the pain you have should be looked at.
You probably have no idea what is causing it anyway or what to do that to make it better. Going to see someone will give you those answers.
Someone like me perhaps?
There you go.
5 reasons why Taking pin kills can make your pain worse.
IF you want a more in-depth explanation, you will find it in my book, PAIN! What it is and how to manage it. You can purchase it HERE.
IF you are looking for advice from a physio on things that work to help with pain
OR
IF you or someone you know realises that you are too dependent on pain pills to live a normal life. Realise that the pills are making things worse, not better and want that to change. Here at Jason Roets Physiotherapy, we have been getting people off pain pills naturally.
Jason
